NEW DISCOVERY AT OLD CITY OF CAESAREA

Started by jong, September 01, 2004, 07:16:23 PM

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historian richard demuth has stated that he thinks the rectangular pit in the shallow promontory of the ancient israeli seacoast city of rome's judean provincial capital caesarea maritima, considered to be by all  archaeologists either the wading or even a fish pool of king herod's palace, is actually the basin of the foundations for a temple to the emperor tiberius caesar. the most important find yet made at the site, in the ruins of the theatre next to the promontory in 1963 by a team of italian archaeologists appropriately enough, is a half-broken inscription slab stating  the roman prefect of the province (pontius pilate) dedicated a temple called a tiberieum. the ruins of the temple have never been located and the artifactual evidence contradicts a statement in the historian tacitus' 'annals of imperial rome' that tiberius only allowed one temple to be built to him and that was at ephesus. the rectangular basin, with its shallower sloping end where the staircase and porch would have been facing landward, is the right shape and size for a small roman temple or imperial shrine of the period and would have contained a marble statue of the emperor. it probably would have associated him with VENUS, a goddess from the sea and mother of the julian gens, as the much bigger nearby temple did with augustus and roma. this would have been flattery on pilate's part as tiberius was a claudian, not a julian; he was adopted by augustus in marriage of tiberius' mother livia. there is even evidence of a precinct wall around the site to have kept the sea out. the inscription stone matches  complete stone slabs laid down around the basin as pavement blocks. however, there is no evidence that there was ever room for a magnificent herodian palace, as it would have been squeezed between the stadium now being excavated and the theatre.